Dreamless

police, water and power, all the people that are trained to deal with natural disasters, they’re wrong and you’re right?”
    The way Matt put it made Zach feel a little silly. He couldn’t come right out and say that a family of supermen was trying to take over his island. That would sound crazy. Feigning disinterest, Zach looked out across the street to the demolished steps of the Atheneum and shrugged.
    That’s when he noticed someone, someone special, like Helen—like those frigging Delos kids. Only this guy was different. There was something inhuman about him. When this guy moved he sort of looked like an insect.
    “Whatever. I don’t really care what happened,” Zach said, acting like he was bored. “Have fun staring down that hole.”
    He walked away, not wanting to waste any more time on someone so obviously on the Deloses’ side. He wanted to see where that freak was going, and maybe figure out what they were all hiding from him.
    He followed the stranger down to the docks, and spotted a beautiful yacht. It was something right out of a storybook. Tall masts, teak deck, fiberglass hull, and red sails. Zach walked toward it with his mouth open. The yacht was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, except for one face. . . . Her face.
    Zach felt someone tap him on the back of his shoulder and, as he turned around, the world went dark.

CHAPTER ONE
    R ed blood bloomed from underneath Helen’s torn fingernails, pooled in the crescents of her cuticles, and trailed down her knuckles in little rivers. Despite the pain, she gripped the ledge more tightly with her left hand so she could try to slide her right hand forward. There was grit and blood under her fingers, making her slip, and her hands were cramping so badly that the center of her palm was starting to spasm. She reached with her right, but didn’t have the strength to pull herself any farther forward.
    Helen slid back with a gasp until she was dangling from her rigid fingertips. Six stories beneath her kicking feet was a dead flowerbed, littered with moldy bricks and slates that had slid off the roof of the dilapidated mansion and broken into bits. She didn’t have to look down to know that the same would happen to her if she lost her grasp on the crumbling window ledge. She tried again to swing a leg up and catch it on the windowsill, but the more she kicked the less secure her grip became.
    A sob escaped from between her bitten lips. She had been hanging from this ledge since she descended into the Underworld that night. It felt to her like hours, maybe days had passed, and her endurance was flagging. Helen cried out in frustration. She had to get off this ledge and go find the Furies. She was the Descender—this was her task. Find the Furies in the Underworld, defeat them somehow, and free the Scions from the Furies’ influence. She was supposed to be ending the cycle of vengeance that compelled Scions to kill each other off, but instead here she was, hanging from a ledge.
    She didn’t want to fall, but she knew that she would get no closer to finding the Furies if she went on clinging here for an eternity. And in the Underworld, every night lasted forever. She knew she needed to end this night and start the next anew, in some other, hopefully more productive, infinity. If she couldn’t pull herself up, that left only one option.
    The fingers of Helen’s left hand began twitching and her grip gave way. She tried to tell herself not to fight it, that it would be better to fall because at least it would be over. But still she clung to the ledge with every bit of strength remaining in her right hand. Helen was too afraid to let herself go. She bit down on her bloody lip in concentration, but the fingers of her right hand slid across the grit and finally came away from the edge. She couldn’t hold on.
    When she hit the ground she heard her left leg snap.
    Helen slapped a hand over her mouth to keep the scream from erupting across her quiet Nantucket bedroom. She could taste the flinty grit of the Underworld on her cramped fingers. In the pewter-blue light of predawn, she listened intently to the sound down the hall of her father getting ready for the day. Thankfully, he didn’t seem to hear anything out of the ordinary, and he went downstairs to start cooking breakfast as if nothing were wrong.
    Lying in bed, trembling with the pain of her broken leg and her pulled muscles, Helen waited for her body to heal itself. Tears slid down