“Oh, good.” He looked up at the bright, blank sky.
Helen hadn’t had a chance to put any clouds in it yet. Clouds popped into existence as they occurred to her, hazing out the yellow sun perfectly so Lucas wasn’t blinded by it.
“Are you sure I’m not dead? ’Cuz I feel kinda dead,” he said suspiciously.
Helen chuckled and laid her hand on his chest. For a moment, the steady thumping of his heart was the only sound in Helen’s world. “You don’t feel dead to me.”
“That’s all that matters,” he said, turning his head to look at her. Worry darkened his eyes. “I know this isn’t possible. What did you do, Helen?”
“I made you a world.”
Lucas sat up and looked around, and she felt suddenly shy, like he was looking at an unfinished painting, and she was still sitting at her easel. Helen willed the grass to stretch out and turn into a field. She put flowers in the grass, bees in the flowers, and filled the air with the scent and sounds of springtime. He watched the world grow, like a carpet unrolling in all directions, and looked back at Helen. He dropped his head, shaking it.
“It figures. If anyone was ever gifted enough to make a whole new world, it would be you, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m not the only one ever,” she admitted, sitting up next to Lucas and regarding him seriously. “Hades did it. Zeus did it. Morpheus did it. And . . . Atlanta did it.”
“Atlanta. As in, Atlantis?” he asked, frowning in thought. Helen nodded. Lucas turned to her, deadly serious. “Helen, do you know where Atlantis is?”
Helen swallowed and nodded. Like removing a Band-Aid, she figured it would be best if she just got it over with quickly.
“It’s gone. I don’t know all the details, but Hades told me that it sank forever when Atlanta lost some kind of challenge.” Helen watched Lucas’s face fall, like something in his body ached. “I’m sorry, Lucas. There is no Atlantis.”
“No. But there’s here,” he said, his mood lifting. Helen looked at him, puzzled.
“Yes, but no Atlantis means that there’s no immortality. All those years the Houses have been killing each other to get to Atlantis and become immortal . . . and it’s all a fairy tale.”
“I’ll bet anything your world is better than Atlantis ever was. And I bet if Atlanta could make people immortal, so can you.”
“Well, thanks, but all I’ve made so far is a field of flowers. Not eternal life.”
He looked at her for a few moments. Helen knew this look. He gave it to her when he was trying to figure out the best way to explain something complicated to her.
“Just spit it out,” she groaned, grinning at the inevitable lesson he was about to give her.
“I’m just thinking about how your world works. Everything you want to happen, happens—no matter how crazy it is, right? But there are still rules,” Lucas said, talking and thinking at the same time. “Let me put it this way. You healed my body. And I know I was pretty close to dead.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“When we go back to the other world. Ah, Earth,” he said, grimacing at how strange it was to say that. “I’m assuming that my wounds won’t come back, will they?”
“Of course not. You’re healed.”
“So you changed my body. Whatever you did to my body here will carry over when we return to Earth. That’s one of the rules.” Lucas waited for Helen to nod, which she did slowly, still trying to catch up with him. “Then what’s to say you couldn’t make me immortal here and I’d stay that way, forever, no matter what world we go to?”
Helen stared at him. “How do you do that? How do you figure everything out so quickly?”
“You may be all-powerful, but nothing beats plain old logic.” He smiled at her. “Am I right? You can make anyone immortal by bringing them here and willing it?”
She nodded silently, thinking about how she’d get injured in Hades and wake up in her bed on Earth and still be injured. She knew from experience that if something happened to the body in one world it carried over into all the others. The same went for immortality. Helen knew this was right implicitly, the same way she knew her feet were there even when she wasn’t thinking about them. She could make herself and Lucas immortal just by thinking it here in her world.
Just one wish made here in this world, sitting in the grass, and she and Lucas could live together, young and healthy forever.
“Don’t,” Lucas said, his face immobile. He knew what Helen was considering. “We need to really think about this before we go and do anything permanent.”
Helen thought about how Lucas had looked when she brought him to her world just moments ago—his charred skin, the bone s
howing raw and red in some of the worst spots. She knew she was tough, but she also knew that there were some things she could handle and some things that she couldn’t. Losing Lucas was not something she could handle. Not now, not ever.