Starcrossed

hoping for a glimpse of Helen.
    He knew he wouldn’t get it. Cassandra had told him that Helen would be standing in a hotel window the next morning, but he still couldn’t make himself stop. He wouldn’t stop, because if by some miracle he did find her, take her out of that hotel, and bring her back to her family, he could prove Cassandra wrong. All he needed was to beat Fate once and he would know that he was the master of himself—not just a prewritten story that gets reread every now and again to amuse the cosmos—but a truly blank slate that he would be allowed to fill with whatever future he decided to write for himself. If he could just find Helen that night and bring her home, then he knew that someday they would beat Fate, and that they could be together.
    He walked all night.
    Helen’s head was pounding and there was a sour, chalky taste in the back of her mouth, like she had chewed an aspirin and didn’t rinse afterward. Her eyes felt swollen and puffy, and the skin on her face felt clammy and hot, but she didn’t feel as dehydrated as she usually did when she visited the dry lands. This was different. She’d been drugged, she suddenly remembered, by a woman. A woman that looked just like her, but older.
    “Take a sip,” said a voice as Helen felt a straw being pressed to her lips. Her eyes flipped open and she saw the woman again, leaning over her and holding a glass of water.
    “Who are you?” Helen asked, her voice crackling. She jerked her mouth away from the suspicious glass of liquid and felt her arms strain against bonds. She was tied to a bed. Still unbearably weak from whatever drug she had been given, Helen knew it would be a while before she was strong enough to break free. She looked around frantically. She was in a hotel room that was lit by candles. It was still night, and she could hear wind and rain battering the window behind the closed curtain.
    “Look at me, Helen! Who do you think I am?” the woman asked so forcefully it momentarily stopped Helen from panicking. “Here, I know you’ll need proof. I would.”
    The woman took out an envelope full of pictures. They were pictures of herself, when she was in her late teens. In one picture she was holding a tiny baby. In another she was sitting and talking to a young Mrs. Aoki while two baby girls, one blonde, one black-haired, played together on the floor. In yet another she was kissing Jerry over her swollen, pregnant belly.
    “Beth,” Helen whispered, her eyes darting over the pictures that she had spent a hefty portion of her childhood searching for.
    “My real name is Daphne. Daphne Atreus. I guess it would be too much to ask for you to call me ‘Mom,’ huh?” Daphne said with a wry smile.
    Helen gestured to her bound wrists. “You guessed right,” she replied, starting to get angry. “You want to tell me why you knocked me out and tied me up?”
    “Because we are out of time, and if I were you I would hate me so much I wouldn’t even give me a second to explain,” Daphne replied with a loving look on her face. “Unless I had been knocked out and tied down first.”
    Helen glared at her, furious and still groggy from the drug. “What do you want from me?”
    Daphne’s face and body began to shift, not just changed in mood, but in shape. One moment Helen was looking at an older version of herself, and the next moment she was looking at a woman in her sixties with salt-and-pepper hair. Before Helen could even gasp, the dowdy woman disappeared and was replaced by a brunette in her late thirties. Then that woman disappeared and Helen was looking at her mother again. She held up Helen’s heart-shaped necklace in one hand and touched her own identical necklace with the other.
    “There are a lot of things I need to tell you about who you are and where you come from. Things that are going to hurt you,” Daphne said in a direct, almost brutal way. “But I don’t have any choice. Creon is on this island right now, and he is coming for you.”

Chapter Sixteen
    A t around six o’clock in the morning, Lucas finally accepted the fact that he had run out of time. The sun was up. It was the next day, and Helen was probably already standing in a hotel window somewhere, in fulfillment of Cassandra’s prophecy. He knew his best bet would be to give up, go home, and wait for his little sister to see something else, even if it half killed him to admit that. He hadn’t beaten Fate. Again.
    Lucas saw the Pig still parked